 Before I begin, I would like you to meet a group of wonderful people. They are graphic design students at the University of Monterey, where I currently work as a professor. They tend to distract easily. All of them have what I would say an unhealthy relationship with Instagram and social media in general. Some of them are still figuring out if they want to be graphic designers or not, and a couple of them, just a couple, because of any number of personal reasons, do not see education as a priority. I've been given the task of teaching them about typography, and it has been a very enlightening experience. Typography is taught as a core subject within the majority of graphic design courses, if not within all of them. However, because of its rich theoretical and practical content, typographic teaching carries a series of inherent challenges. First of all, in order to develop typographic awareness, students are expected to learn about a wide array of subjects, going from general to specific, from the history and development of a specific writing system to current typesetting conventions and within some programs, even typeface design. Secondly, students need enough time to digest theoretical information, put it into practice, and develop their own typographic skills. Besides the fact that type-related content varies from institution to institution, the amount of time available to cover it greatly differs amongst them. And finally, the majority of universities treat graphic design not only as an academic degree, but also as a launchpad into other areas of specialization. As a result, within any given graphic design program, there is a complex ecosystem of core and optional subjects, from branding to motion graphics and illustration, all of them competing for this student's time and attention. How we as educators tackle these challenges is of great importance, since greater minds that my own have stated that type is the single most important graphic design element and typography is the most consequential course or set of courses a student can take as an undergraduate. Now, education is a very complicated subject. There are countless studies that showcase the advantages and disadvantages of both traditional and non-traditional education models, and experts have yet to come up with a unified framework on how to improve slash change things. I will not be providing such framework. Instead, I will be bringing up for discussion two tools that have made my job as a professor, which is the facilitation of learning both engaging and enjoyable for myself and more importantly for my students. I am talking about gamification and storytelling. Gamification promotes learning by introducing several mechanics that help students retain information and develop new skills. Storytelling, on the other hand, provides a narrative structure to typography, presenting both its historical and theoretical content in a contextual manner. I am quite aware that these tools have been discussed to the dead by now, and that they've practically become the war cry for non-traditional education all over the world. My point is not to advocate their use, but to open up a dialogue between educators, professionals and students about typographic teaching, and by consequence about typographic learning. So, let's play some games. Gamification is using game-based mechanics, aesthetics and game thinking to engage people, motivate action, promote learning, and solve problems. Within this definition, there are three key elements to take into consideration. The first one being game mechanics, which are all the procedures commonly found within any game, like rules, scores, goals, objectives, time limits, and so on and so forth. All of these can be sorted out into wider categories, which are narrative, control, feedback, challenges, collaboration, social connections, and mastery. The second element is game aesthetics, which refer to the look and feel of any gaming experience. This is a very important element, since how an experience is aesthetically perceived by a person greatly influences his or her willingness to engage with it. And finally, game thinking, which is probably the most important element of gamification. It is turning an everyday activity into a game, turning jogging into a competition, or pretending you are Tom Cruise running at full speed to fulfill a mission that seems impossible and save the world from total annihilation for the eleventh time. With these three concepts in mind, certain learning outcomes can be framed within the context of a game. For instance, the assimilation of theoretical information, which if we take a step back and see it from the perspective of a new graphic design student, can be a daunting task. This can be presented as a jeopardy game, with the professor playing the part of the host and everything. Doing so provides a narrative structure to the act of studying. It promotes collaboration and helps students develop social connections. It also gives them a sense of progress, and it tricks them into studying without them really noticing it, which is awesome. Whenever I present typesetting conventions only within a digital environment, the students tend to approach it as a recipe or a checklist. However, when presented within a playground for creative experimentation, such as a letterpress or printing studio, typesetting nuances are better appreciated and understood. Not only the physicality of type helps students understand the difference between typeface, font, leading, kerning, and feeding, but the whole printing process can easily be framed within the context of a game, introducing time limits, scavenger hunts, quests, and so on and so forth. The technical knowledge and abilities regarding typeface design and typeface development seem to be a very hard subject to grasp for my students. They particularly struggle with the correct implementation of the CI curves and with the correct execution of kerning. Thankfully, there are specific type teaching tools, or graphic design teaching tools for that matter, that have been developed with gamification as a core component. These tools take advantage of what a digital environment has to offer in terms of gaming, providing instant feedback, a sense of progress, and instant gratification for students. Mine are particularly fond of these two, for example. Now, if we're going to talk about daunting tasks, coding seems to be the Achilles heel for any graphic design student. Mine in particular struggle not necessarily with syntax, but with logical thinking and structure. Thank God there's a wonderful application called Dropout, which not only provides a graphic environment for coding, specifically Python coding, but also serves as a playground, a graphic playground where students can experiment, have fun, make mistakes, learn, or they can code just for the hell of it. Now, let's tell some stories. Since the development of the spoken language, human beings have been using stories to transmit important information. Narratives have served as a way not only to engage and entertain, but also to instruct on values, norms, practices, and history or general knowledge. Our appetite for story is a reflection of the profound human need to grasp the patterns of living, not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience. Within this phrase, Robert McKee, Pinpoint, sorry, the main characteristics that make storytelling and stories in general so universally appealing. They make what he calls the patterns of living personal, meaning that the listener develops a social or sympathetic relationship with a character, a thing, or an event. As a result, information presented within a story is no longer foreign or inconsequential. It gains meaning. Stories are emotional. They elicit an effective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, sadness, or anger is felt by the listener. As a result, the information presented within a story is no longer foreign or inconsequential. It gains meaning. And finally, stories are an experience. The listener is involved, is a participant in a specific event, engaging and connecting with it. As a result, information presented with a story is no longer foreign or inconsequential. It gains meaning. Whenever I bombard my students with specific dates, facts, and events, they quickly sound out. It is hard for them to care about the development of mnemonic, pictographic, ideographic, transitional, and phonetic writing. Or to understand the relevance of each of these stages. However, if I tell them a story about an ancient man who, by the end of a hunting trip, sat next to the fire and looked up over the sky, he started to think about his father, trying to remember his face and failing at it. He started to feel sad and wonder if the same thing will happen to him, if his son and everyone he knew would eventually forget about him. He started to feel so small and significant. He started to feel angry because he mattered, because he existed, because he was born and he reached adulthood, not on his feet to accomplish. He loved a woman and mourned her death while celebrating his son's birth. He lived, he laughed, he cried, he suffered, he prospered, he mattered. But when he decided he was not going to be forgotten. So he wet his hand with the blood of the hunted animal, mixed it with a bit of dirt, and pushed it against the wall of the cave as strong as he could, leaving an undying imprint of his existence. Or maybe he just got dirty and used the wall of the cave as an apkin. We don't know, but the thing is that you all got hooked up in the story and my students do the same thing. Between the story I can insert bits and pieces of information about the development of pneumonic pictographic, ideographic, transitional, and phonetic language. And this resonates better with students. A similar thing happens with the capital Roman. When presented without any context, students struggle to understand the relevance of the inscription found at the base of the trigence column. However, if I present such information as an emotional story of an ancient civilization capable of the highest highs and the lowest lows with a constant fear of being invaded, fighting multiple wars, winning some and losing some, during which many political, economic, social, cultural, and typographic conventions were established, plenty of which we still use till this day. Then this information better resonates with students and they appreciate it. While Gutenberg's type crafting and type setting processes of vital importance for any type-related course, the process itself is so archaic and distant from current graphic design students that the importance and relevance gets lost in translation. There is no relationship between Gutenberg's process and students. However, we can build such a relationship. If we tell the story of Johannes Gutenberg as a radiant hero, who managed to make the impossible possible, whose wit and perseverance helped him fulfill his destiny, who developed a series of progressive and interdependent steps, which included matrixes, punches, swords, molds, and presses in order to make large-scale printing feasible, who risked and sacrificed everything for the greater good and whose legacy forever changed the face of the earth, the historical and technical difference between several type-formants as well as which one contains what in terms of features and how and when to implement such features is a lot of information for any student to digest. However, I can present such information as a story that recounts a technological race, a ruthless technological race filled with intrigue, espionage, betrayal, and alliances where companies try to outdo one another. And then the nuances between specific format and the other one and the features that each of them provide are easier to digest and implement for students. Now, when executed properly, both storytelling and gamification work wonders within an educational environment, even within a graduate or post-graduate context. I've always found that the KVK approach to type design is very game-like with experimentation and ingenuity at its core. And the University of Reading has an amazing archive filled with historic wonders that come to life thanks to some of the greatest storytellers I've ever met in my life. However, it's important to acknowledge that these tools are not perfect and that they will not work for every teaching scenario. There are specific subjects that are easier to translate to a story or a game. Others are very hard to do so or nearly impossible. Additionally, there are a couple of risks that are convenient to take in mind. For those of you who don't know what this is, this is considered to be the worst game ever made and it destroyed the company. Anyway, in order to successfully achieve the gamification of learning, it is paramount to design teaching activities around specific learning outcomes while implementing gamification. The main risk of gamification is not that it domes down the learning experience, which is debatable, but bad game design. It's not enough to reward points and badges. The game is not the evaluation of a task, but the task itself. And designing tasks takes time and effort. Another risk is that gamification changes or morphs the process of learning and students might develop specific expectations about the whole thing, meaning that students can get accustomed to the use of extrinsic motivators for learning, which is great and feasible within certain contexts. But there will be scenarios where learning is not engaging and nor that it should be, where students have to take off their partying hats and put on their thinking hats, where the main goal and reward of learning is learning for the sake of learning. Once again, if you don't know what this is, this is the poster for what is considered to be one of the worst movies ever made. It's so bad that it's good and the story makes absolutely no sense. When telling a story for the purpose of education, certain aspects and events are either greatly simplified in order to maintain narrative structure or dramatized and exaggerated. This means that in every single story there's a subjective point of view, the point of view of the narrator. And it's very important to make sure that such point of view does not interfere with the learning outcomes, to walk a very thin line between factual and based on factual. Telling a story for teaching is pretty much the same as dressing a salad, where the salad itself is the information that we want the students to learn, and the dressing being the story we are building around it. Too much dressing can easily ruin a salad, meaning that the student might focus too much on the story and not enough on the actual information we want him or her to learn. So, I have students that can't recall what Gutenberg's innovations were, but they won't forget that he died in poverty, because that's what resonated with them. Whenever telling a story for educational purposes, it's important to reinforce and emphasize, constantly and poignantly, the learning outcomes. I've been using storytelling and gamification within my classes for a couple of years now, and the effects these tools have had on students are evident. They distract less, are more focused and engaged. They process information faster, turning it into knowledge, and they implement it in a better way. And even when these tools work wonders with any student profile, they excel with the ones that already value learning, like them. They are part of what is considered to be a high-performance group, meaning that they are the smartest and most committed kids within campus, and it's been a joy to work with them. They do not represent the majority of students. Most students struggle, either with type or math, and I see it as part of the job description to make sure that they struggle a little less, perhaps by telling stories and playing games. Now, the main thing to do is to change the perception of the struggling students of education, from education being boring to being interesting, which I'm kind of getting the hang of it. The next step is changing this perception once again, from education being interesting to being valuable. And there's where the true challenge resides. Thank you very much.